Beta Rant

I’m not generally a fan of posts that spew negativity and have nothing nice to say… but today I am grumpy, and I just can’t help myself.

How do I hate Beta? Let me count the ways:

I hate that it’s rarely available when I want to play. I know patches and updates are important, but the servers are down more often than they are up when I try to log on.

I hate that not all of my preferred mods work. Playing with the defualt UI makes my eyes hurt.

I hate that it’s difficult to report a bug. Hot tip: If you want people do do QA on your game, for free, don’t make it difficult to log bugs. These greyed-out buttons – bad! Very, very bad. And seriously, if you’re not going to let people report bugs in-game, why tease them by having these buttons here at all?

I hate it when I can’t hand in quests.

I hate that there are no premade 90s. Some people just like to raid. I want to raid test, but I don’t want to level to 90. Why? Well, first of all, I don’t want a million spoilers before the game is even realeased. I don’t want to do the quests twice. I don’t want to sink 10-12 hours into something I’m going to have to do all over again on September 25th.

I hate roll-backs. I hate that yesterday when I logged off before a server shutdown I was 90% of the way to level 89, and when I logged on next I was 59% of the way to level 89. As someone who wasn’t thrilled about leveling in the first place, this is the nail in the coffin as far as my having anything but negative thoughts about the whole beta experience.

4 responses to “Beta Rant”

I’m right there with you about the feedback and the bug reporting. Past betas have been a lot easier – you got surveys after finishing quests, you could ALWAYS report a bug (except when that was, well, bugged) and it made life a zillion times better for the reporters of bugs. I was a diligent beta tester in the WotLK and Cata beta tests, CONSTANTLY reporting things.

I haven’t reported a single bug yet for MoP’s beta because it requires leaving the game and going to the official forums and posting there. It’s just so much easier to do it while remaining in-game. That’s my dealbreaker, that I can’t do it in-game. I think I’ve been tempted to report things a couple of times, but they were already reported on the forums (misdirection not working on a hunter pet, for example), so I just… didn’t bother.

It’s really bothered me throughout the entire beta testing process, so you’re certainly not alone in having that bug you. (haha, see what I did? Bug? hahaha. ;))

The levelling… not so bad, for me (although I’m 87 on Kurn and 86 and a half on Madrana), but I can’t understand why they don’t want to give out 90 premades. It completely eludes me. I’m sure we’re going to see a TON of balancing changes because, frankly, max-level content is not going to be fully tested by launch because of the lack of people who have had either the time or the inclination to level to 90.

I’m guessing that Mists had many more people in beta than the previous expansions because of the annual pass. People being able to report bugs in game would result in a lot of bugs being reported and repeated, but still, you can’t make it hard for people. I had some bugs I wanted to report when I first got the beta, but there was no way I was going to the forums to submit them.

The lack of premade 90s is the worst thing for me. Like you, I have no idea what the reasoning behind it is. They’ve had months of people testing the quests and such, would it kill them to let people fast-track to raids and heroic testing at this point?

I agree! I was initially so excited to get into beta only to find out that bug reporting was non-existent ingame. I’m not really a forum poster so it was quite a disappointment.

My current peeve with beta, however, is the lack of pre-made level 90 toons. I don’t want to spoil my MoP levelling early on, but I’d still like to see how healing is working out at level cap. I’m particularly concerned with how Disc priests are shaping up. (Heard some worrying things bout healing issues with them).

The best I can do for now is follow feedback from other players on the forums and keep my fingers crossed that they don’t launch with any glaring issues or imbalances.Saya recently posted..Memories of Theramore

Yes, the lack of premades is bad, and I can’t think of a single reason for not having them. I think my beta character will be stuck at 89, as I can’t make myself get the 32 million XP (or something like that) to get to 90.